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Deadline’s Read the Screenplay series spotlighting the scripts behind the year’s most talked-about movies continues with the Venice Film Festival-premiering Babygirl, A24’s erotic thriller from writer-director Halina Reijn that stars Nicole Kidman and Harris Dickinson. It hit theaters December 20.
In Venice, Kidman won the Best Actress prize for playing Romy, a high-powered CEO whose life is controlled by structure, tight scheduling and an all-too-keen awareness of how she’s perceived at the heights of a male-dominated field. The one thing she cannot control is her sexual urges that haven’t been fulfilled after 19 years of marriage to her husband Jacob (Antonio Banderas).
Romy, trapped in her suppressed desires, is quickly undone after she meets Samuel (Dickinson), an intern at her company who transgresses professional boundaries. This dynamic inadvertently fosters a dominant/submissive power play, providing Romy with an unexpected outlet to explore and indulge her kinks.
Through deliciously playful provocations, Babygirl delves into the tender, wickedly funny and unexpectedly romantic consequences of repressed desires, charting the unconventional paths individuals take to find liberation. The scenes are intended to provoke audience discomfort, mirroring Romy’s internal repression as it culminates in her guttural moans.
Kidman has since won Best Actress from the National Board of Review and garnered several nominations including Best Actress at the Golden Globes and the Gotham Awards, which also gave the film a Best Feature nomination.
Crafted with the female gaze in mind, Reijn’s film joins a subculture of cinematic explorations into eroticism and kink, from the sexual thrillers of the ’90s to classics like Liliana Cavani’s The Night Porter (1974), Adrian Lyne’s 9 ½ Weeks (1986) and Steven Shainberg’s Secretary (2002) starring Maggie Gyllenhaal. All delve into the complexities of dominant/submissive relationships where individuals explore and negotiate power dynamics in a consensual and safe manner.
In Reijn’s hands, the genre’s deliberate goading of sexual mores becomes something deeply human and bitingly fun, an erotic thriller for an age where everything is permitted but American puritanical moral impulses still run deep. Ultimately, at the core of the forbidden fruit is a seductive, tender act of self-acceptance for its protagonist.
Reijn found inspiration for the script after a friend told her about a woman who, across her entire 25-year marriage, had never experienced an orgasm with her husband. She was both awed by and in some ways unsurprised by that possibility.
“My question was about self-love. Mainly, how do I love all parts of myself?” Reijn says. This line of thinking was inspired by Verhoeven, who directed Reijn, an actress before she became a filmmaker, in a major supporting role in Black Book. “Paul Verhoeven always told me I could only make a movie if I had a specific question. For this story I wondered: Are we animals or are we civilized? Can we make peace with the animal inside of us? Is it possible for the different parts of ourselves to co-exist and, in turn, for us to love our whole selves without shame?”
Reijn’s film not only earnestly contends with — and teasingly complicates — our ideas around sexuality, gender and desire, but also our contemporary discourse around those very things. As Romy and Samuel haltingly explore sexual fantasies, laying out then relishing in bending the rules and boundaries of their dalliance, the film confronts our culture’s great thorny shadow — power and sex — only to gleefully flip it all on its back, upside down, and right-side up again.
“That whole relationship between the two of them is just going: Who’s the cat? Who’s the mouse? Who’s using who? And you could also ask that about Romy and Jacob — who’s using who?” Reijn says, referencing Romy’s theater-director husband. “Would he live in a house like that with his salary from the theater? I don’t think so. They’re all using each other because they’re all humans.”
Click below to read the script.
